


fantasy and microchips

by badskeletonpuns



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Cybertron Halloween, Gen, Gen Work, Halloween, Kid & Robot Bonding, Platonic Relationships, Pumpkins, Transform or Treat, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:08:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27234007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badskeletonpuns/pseuds/badskeletonpuns
Summary: Team Prime helps the kids carve pumpkins for Halloween! The kids explain Halloween to them, and it reminds them of a holiday they used to celebrate back on Cybertron. Features team bonding, elaborate pumpkin art, and some self-indulgent Cybertronian worldbuilding.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 46





	fantasy and microchips

**Author's Note:**

> this is my transform or treat 2020 gift for blackblockconsortia on tumblr! :D If you're on AO3 and see this, let me know your AO3 username and i'll gift it to you :^) hope you enjoy!!

“So we’re going to carve these gourds into organic monsters?” Arcee asked, as she, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead stepped through the ground bridge into base with their human companions. 

Miko, perched on Bulkhead’s shoulder with her arms wrapped around a pumpkin that was almost larger than she was, nodded enthusiastically. “Whatever you want! You can do cool teeth and angry eyes, or leave some of the goop in there so it looks like it’s pumpkin-bleeding, it’s awesome.” 

“It doesn’t have to be a monster,” Raf clarified. “Sometimes people carve other designs on them.” He held his pumpkin in both arms, orange and yellow stripes interspersed along its width. 

“But then it’s not scary!” Miko protested. “It’s supposed to like, scare away the ghosts!” She twisted her face into a ‘spooky’ grimace, waving her hands in emphasis and almost dropping her pumpkin. 

Bulkhead got his hand up in time to catch Miko and her pumpkin and set them down on the base’s upper deck carefully. “Wait, are human ghosts actually real?” 

Jack, his own pumpkin secured under one arm, laughed. “No, it’s just a tradition. Jack-o-lanterns and trick-or-treating are more of kid things, but carving them is still fun.”

“And candy,” Miko added. 

“Definitely candy,” Raf and Jack agreed. 

Ratchet, still standing by the ground bridge controls, shook his head. “I’ve looked up some information on Halloween, and it sounds like a bunch of excuses for mischief that no one needs.” 

Miko hefted her pumpkin into her arms, almost tipping backwards with the weight of it. “That’s what makes it so fun!” she insisted. “Um, where’s the table we’re carving on?” She stuck her head out to one side, barely able to see around the pumpkin. 

“Here, I got it.” Bulkhead carefully scooped up the pumpkin and set it down on the folding table the kids had set up earlier. “You know, it actually kind of reminds me of a holiday we used to have on Cybertron—” He made a soft beeping sound, like the ones Bumblebee used to talk.

Bumblebee imitated the sound, tipping his head to one side querulously. 

Raf wrinkled his nose in confusion. “What does that mean?” 

Bulkhead looked over at Arcee. “I’m not sure how to translate it from Cybertronian—Arcee, any ideas?” 

“Firewalls Blazing Night, maybe? Fireup Defenses in Darkness?” She shrugged. “That’s the closest to a literal translation I can get. It’s an excuse for bots to act like newbuilds and eat junk, but the toasted calcite is pretty good.” 

Jack had set his pumpkin down on the table and was leaning it back, considering the dimensions, when he caught that last bit and looked up. “Hold on, isn’t calcite a rock? I thought you guys just ate—or fueled, or whatever—energon?” 

“Energon is what we need to function,” Ratchet explained. “Other minerals can be good in moderation, but too much of them will clog up your systems with gunk.” 

Miko nodded. “Like candy corn, I get it.” 

“I gotta say, I have seen corn, and it does not look anything like the candy form of it you showed me,” Bulkhead said. He reached across the deck’s railing to steady Miko’s pumpkin while she began drawing her design onto it. 

“Not that this conversation isn’t fascinating, but I have work to do.” Ratchet checked over the ground bridge systems one final time before heading out of the main room. “Bumblebee, can you let Optimus in after his patrol? I’m going to work on fixing some bugs in a new self-repair program I’m trying to design.” 

Bumblebee chirped in affirmation before turning back to Bulkhead and beeping a rapid series of questions. 

“He says he doesn’t remember much of Cybertron’s old traditions,” Raf translated for the other kids. “I guess he’s younger than the other bots? He wants to know what Firewalls or Fireup or whatever they call it was about.” 

“I kinda do too,” Jack said. 

“I’m… not sure I should tell most of my stories from that holiday,” Bulkhead said. It wasn’t easy for a giant robot to look sheepish, but that was by far the best way to describe his expression. “It’s about pretending to have a computer virus, so you have to act like it’s controlling you, right? So that it doesn’t  _ actually _ control you.” 

Bumblebee’s doorwings flicked in interest, and he blipped a request for elaboration. 

Arcee leaned over the railing as well, watching as each of the humans began carving their pumpkins. “The story goes that a long time ago on Cybertron, we were invaded by an alien species that could get inside your armor and rewrite your coding on the fly, without you even realizing it was there until it was too late. It would start giving you commands, and you’d have no choice but to obey, no matter what.” 

“Like those wasps that control the caterpillars!” Miko exclaimed. “Slash Monkey did this super metal song about those guys.” She strummed an invisible electronic guitar, scraper spoon in one hand and miniature keyhole saw in the other. Pumpkin seeds and strings went flying across the room. 

“Yeah, something like that,” Arcee said, flicking bits of pumpkin off her arm. “Anyway, a clever bot figured out that these aliens didn’t like to share their puppets, so if they thought you were already infected, they’d leave you alone.” 

“Which is why it’s tradition to cause some trouble,” Bulkhead interjected. “Infected bots were usually sabotaging everyone’s scrap, so to blend in, you had to sabotage too.” 

“Sabotage!” Miko cheered, stabbing the keyhole saw back into her pumpkin. 

“Sabotage,” Arcee agreed, with somewhat less enthusiasm. “Anyway, one day all of the uninfected bots realized that they could ally with each other to take out the infected bots, or the ‘zombies,’ I think is the best English word for them. They tricked the zombies into following them inside a forge and one of its superheated rooms. The bots themselves were fine, but the invaders couldn’t handle the heat. It burned away them and their zombie coding.” 

“Wait, how did the heat burn away the code?” Raf asked. 

“No one really thought that hard about it,” admitted Bulkhead. “But now, in memory of the heat that drove off the aliens, we have a bonfire at the end of the night! We roast calcite and drink energon, and everyone laughs about the tricks they got up during the cycle—er, day—before.” 

“I do like the bonfire,” Arcee conceded. 

Bumblebee was in the middle of buzzing another question when his communicator went off in a burst of static. He patted the top of Raf’s pumpkin gently and turned away to let Optimus back into the base, finishing his question as he went. 

“What kind of sabotage did we do?” Bulkhead chuckled, rubbing at the back of his helm with the same sheepiness from earlier. “Oh, you know, we let the air out of other mechs’ tires when they were recharging, swapped hydraulic oil for washfluid, maybe accidentally crashed into a couple of buildings. The infection made bots clumsy! You had to cause a little damage, it was tradition.” 

“Mhhmm, ‘tradition’,” Arcee said. Her tone was drier than the desert outside. “The only reason you’d ever wreck anything.” 

Optimus rolled into the base and transformed in one smooth motion. He paused upon taking in the room. “Did I miss something?” 

“It’s part of a human festival, Halloween,” Arcee said. “Bulkhead, you wanna try and explain it, or should I?” 

“Um…” He counted off on his fingers as he listed the components of the holiday. “You dress up as a human monster, and go to other people’s houses where you either sabotage them or they give you candy, but to keep your own house safe from people who want to trick you, you carve up one of these big squash to make them go away.” 

The three kids looked at each other and grinned. “Close enough,” Jack whispered. 

“You know,” Optimus was saying. “It’s a little reminiscent of something we used to celebrate back on Cybertron—well, without the organic vegetation. I think you’d call it Firewall’s Eve?” 

Arcee, Bulkhead, and Bumblebee shared a glance in silent agreement to not acknowledge any of their earlier, less successful attempts to translate the holiday’s name. 

“Hey, I finished my pumpkin!” Raf announced. “Bumblebee helped with the little details.” 

His pumpkin had been chiselled carefully to let light shine through parts of it even though there was still part of the wall in place, creating an intricate design of a spaceship that looked as though it could light up and take off in moments. 

Miko clapped her hands together with glee. “Oh! I have the perfect thing!” She fished around in her pockets, pulling out two tiny pumpkins. “Just a sec, hand me that Sharpie.” After scribbling on the pumpkins, she triumphantly revealed two small alien faces drawn on in black marker. “For your ship!” 

Raf accepted the pumpkins with a smile, arranging them at the base of the spaceship. “Thanks, Miko.” 

“Well, now I feel like mine’s a little less impressive,” Jack said wryly, turning his pumpkin onto its side to reveal the final design. His carving was simpler, starker—a silhouette of a motorcycle reared up on its back wheel, followed by racing flames. 

“You trying to tell me something, Jack? Am I scary?” Arcee folded her arms across her chest, but the smirk tugging at the edges of her face plate took any real anger away from the gesture. 

He held up his arms, placating. “Only when you want to be! I added the flames because you were talking about liking the bonfire, and, well—I thought it’d be cool.” 

“It is cool,” she assured him. “You did a good job.” 

“Super cool,” Miko agreed. “Both of your pumpkins are awesome, but come on, neither of them are scary!” 

“Decepticons are in a spaceship—”

“Crashing is a real danger for humans—”

Miko waved her arms, cutting off all objections. “Yeah, sure, they’re  _ logically _ scary when you think about them, but are they scary like this?!” She stepped aside, gesturing at the jack-o-lantern she and Bulkhead had wrought. 

The room was silent. 

“That is… You started with a regular pumpkin, right?” Jack said, unable to take his eyes off of Miko’s creation. Bits of it had been chipped away, but with less regularity than Raf’s smooth spaceship surface, leaving a knobbled and rough skin to it. 

Gnarled teeth sprouted from a distended mouth, draped with stringy pumpkin guts.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Miko said, wiping away a faux tear. 

“It might be the scariest pumpkin I’ve ever seen,” Raf murmured. 

“We’ll scare away anyone who tries to trick our place!” Bulkhead said proudly. He held his hand low so Miko could high-five him. 

“And,” Miko said, rummaging in her coat pockets again, “I’ve got one more surprise!” She pulled out a final miniature pumpkin, this one a pale white. She’d carved familiar oval eyes into it, and layers of gnashing teeth. “It’s a scraplet, see? I wanted to do something spooky for you guys, too!” 

Bulkhead shuddered and stepped back. “You know what, that might be a little too scary.” 

“Awww…” 

Across the room, the door slid open to reveal Ratchet, but… something was different about him. The medic seemed to shuffle his way into the room, and there was a dingy wash over his armor. 

“You doing okay, Ratchet?” Arcee asked. “You didn’t have some bad energon, did you?” 

A wheezing sound, like a computer’s fans failing to run a startup sequence, was all that came in reply. 

“Guys…” Jack trailed off.

“He’s fine!” Bulkhead insisted. “That story we told was just, you know, a story. Zombie programs like that aren’t actually real.” 

Ratchet’s fans wheezed again, and he stumbled a step closer to the other bots. Optimus moved in front of the group. 

“Can I check you over, old friend?” he asked, holding his hands in front of him to stop Ratchet. “Just in case, we don’t want any coding viruses transmitting to the other bots.” 

An eerie, hollow echo from Ratchet’s vocalizers repeated  _ just in case, just in case. _

“Ratchet was working on self-repair stuff, right?” Raf whispered. “Did you know some of the most dangerous replicating viruses were created because programmers were trying to be helpful?” 

“I wish I still didn’t know that!” Miko hissed. 

Ratchet took another shambling step towards Optimus.

“I’m afraid I can’t let you come any close—” Optimus began to warn, before Ratchet lurched forward with surprising speed, colliding with the Prime in a racket of clashing metal. Everyone in the room jumped, the kids shouting and the bots trying to draw whatever weapons lay close to hand. 

When the echoing sound of the initial collision faded away, Ratchet stood shaking with Optimus’s hands on his shoulders, but it quickly became clear he was shaking with laughter. 

“Now that,” he said, rebooting his vocals with a burst of static, “that is how you scare someone on Firewall’s Eve.” 

**Author's Note:**

> and then he gave the bots calcite he’d had stored away just in case and had taken the time he said he was using to work on his program in order to toast it, and the kids shared candy and they watched a scary movie!!! good times were had by all  
> other important notes: yes i DID spend like an hour researching and workshopping cybertronian halloween and yes i DID have just as much trouble naming it in english as arcee and breakdown. Firewall’s Eve is sort of a pun about how yes it is about a literal bonfire/heat, but also firewalls to defend against a virus! and, fun fact, the wasp parasite bit and the bit about zombie computers being the pawns of viruses and their user/the system not KNOWING it’s a pawn are both real things.  
> isn’t learning fun!  
> and raf’s bit about programmers trying to be helpful is stretching the truth a LITTLE, but programmers have actually attempted to create useful computer worms that exploit vulnerabilities to fix other vulnerabilities, but they… don’t usually turn out all that well.  
> also, unrelated to this fic but something i happened upon in research and need to share with you all, there is malware called the following: “BASHLITE (also known as Gafgyt, Lizkebab, Qbot, Torlus and LizardStresser).” like, that is TOO MANY NAMES, PUT SOME BACK??? ‘lizardstresser,’ WHY???  
> one last note—the title is from the song “weird science,” if anyone was curious.  
> ANYWAY! thank you for reading, i hope everyone had a fun spooky time!!! :D


End file.
